It’s Not About the Climbing!

My school has the good fortune to have built a challenge course on our campus. It was completed last winter and this summer training was offered to any interested faculty to become a facilitator with the course. I decided to participate in part because I was directly approached and invited by our challenge course manager. (What a good reminder about personal investment and direct asking.) I also knew that my students would be thrilled! I went into it thinking that I would become more comfortable at heights and learn more about all the elements and how they can be used with students.

Wow, was I wrong! Yes, there were practical skills involved. I learned how to self-belay up a pole and safely set a pulley system for a dynamic belay. I learned how to tie specific knots. I learned how belay a person traversing a high element and on a climbing wall. How high? 35 feet off the ground! I even got to play on the elements where I felt comfortable pushing myself. I learned about a couple of the low elements, options for use with my fourth graders. But the key takeaway for  me was that our challenge course is simply a tool. A tool much like a classroom, a whiteboard, books, science equipment, maps, everything that we use to guide our students to access the curriculum. It’s an exciting tool for sure, and I have a responsibility to keep the focus on the learning.

What I learned has so much carryover into academic areas and especially into the social-emotional learning that we do. As a facilitator on the challenge course, I must create an environment of emotional and physical safety so that students can thrive. That’s what I do as a classroom teacher. If I don’t enable a student to feel safe, especially emotionally safe, it doesn’t matter how dynamic and exciting my teaching is – little learning will happen.

Choice and Voice are two other key components that work together to help learners develop self-efficacy. I feel strongly about giving kids choices in the classroom and making sure that they have input whenever possible.This isn’t new to me. Somehow, seeing it in this context and experiencing it as a learner this past week, helped me own the understanding in a deeper way than I had before.

I learned about the difference between encouragement and coercion, and how the words can sound EXACTLY THE SAME, depending on who made the choice. That was mind-blowing to think about, especially in connection with how I present and guide our Reading Challenge. I will be spending time in the next couple of weeks before kids arrive thinking about how to better present the Challenge and engage kids in making real-to-them choices so that I can encourage them throughout the year, not make them feel coerced to meet a goal that I set for them. So much of the language that I learned last week around identifying a person’s chosen challenge on the course is directly applicable to goal-setting with kids. I’m excited to use it and increase how much goal-setting and reflection we do as a learning community.

There was so much that I learned, and so much that I still have to digest. I can’t possibly represent it here in a single reflection. I imagine that my learning will be pondered frequently in this blog over the coming year, and I know that the facilitation learning I gained will play a role in my professional goals for this coming year. I’m still churning ideas in my head for how to craft the wording of my goal.

The icing on the cake is the stronger connection that I feel with the nine other faculty members who were in the training with me. I got to know teachers who I rarely see because of the different ages of learners that we teach. We decided to make our group an ongoing Professional Learning Community (PLC) for this school year. We’ll create times to practice our practical skills and talk about how to implement these ideas into our everyday teaching. We’ll celebrate success that happens. We’ll invite each other into our classrooms so that we can refine our skills. We’ll collaborate in ways that we don’t even know right now. It’s exciting, and I’m so glad that I took this class. It was definitely NOT about the climbing!

Self-chosen element + self-chosen goal + personal challenge = celebration!

NSTA Engineering Workshop

I had the privilege of presenting a workshop at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) STEM Forum in Denver last week. Last winter I was incorporating engineering design challenges into my science curriculum at the same time that I saw the NSTA call for proposals. I thought about what I had been doing with my students and chose a challenge that I could implement and demonstrate at a conference. I called on two of my colleagues, our Technology Integration Specialist and an Upper School English teacher, and they graciously reviewed my proposal draft to provide helpful feedback.

I was excited this spring when I finally learned that I had been accepted, and true to form, pulled my slides together in the week before the conference. As always, the ideas had been percolating for the last month, and I had proactively asked our parent and faculty community to save and bring in any cardboard tubes in the last weeks of school, so my procrastination was not quite as bad as it sounds. Every time that I went into my classroom this summer, I continued to discover even more tubes! I’m grateful to work within such a kind and supportive community. It’ll be great to have our cardboard tube collection be robust for future projects.

I had so much fun presenting. It was interesting to reflect that the last time I did a full presentation at a national conference was over 20 years ago, during my first incarnation as a teacher. The technology has changed (online slides vs overhead projector, for one thing), but it’s still all about sharing knowledge and making connections. I appreciated that the adults fully embraced the hands on challenge to build marble runs, and I loved that their products reflected the inherent creativity in the challenge, the necessity of collaboration and communication to be successful, and the critical thinking required to problem solve.

There’s a chance that I might be able to offer this workshop for preservice teachers. I’ve already begun thinking about how to adapt it for a different group, teachers with less experience and training. They’ll need more scaffolding and more opportunities to hear their peers’ ideas.

When the session was over, I felt energized. It was a successful workshop, and a great conference. I appreciate that NSTA thoughtfully invited speakers to address a wide range of teacher populations (preschool through high school and even higher education), a variety of science topics, and an array of teaching questions and strategies. The length was a perfect time to attend sessions, gain information, and not feel overloaded. I’m grateful that I took a chance writing a proposal this winter and for the opportunities that resulted.

Launching a new blog

As a teacher, I pride myself on being a lifelong learner. So here I am, learning about creating my own blog as I go. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I’m finally pushing up against my own self-imposed deadlines. I was a rule-following student, and I know it helps me to set boundaries so that I can get things done!

I’ve asked myself why I’m pushing myself to do this. It certainly is sucking up a lot of my time in this early phase of the learning curve as I stumble and figure things out! One of my primary reasons is to formalize reflections on my own teaching and learning. I read a lot – professional books, lots of other education bloggers, and kidlit, in addition to “regular” grown up reading. In my reading, I continue to notice the importance of taking time to reflect. I provide time and support for my students to reflect on what they’ve learned and what their goals are. Now it’s time to create that space for myself. Thinking ahead to the upcoming school year, doing more reflection will be one of my professional development goals.

I could just do this privately in an old-school journal, and that would still be helpful. Keeping a blog adds layers of benefits that I look forward to reaping. By blogging, I open my thoughts and reflections to the input of others, who may have additional points that I hadn’t considered or even experience that would help me out. I appreciate being a connected teacher, and I’m striving to increase the online network that I have through this electronic journal. Finally, my school is encouraging teachers to maintain digital portfolios to document professional growth. I hope to include photos and lesson ideas here in addition to written reflections.

I’m modeling for my students and their families what it means to be a lifelong learner, to take a risk and try something new. When my students stumble, I am able to be there to empathize with fresh emotions from my own mistakes as well as hope and encouragement to see through the challenges.